2015-12-24

Live on TV via Skype!

I am not a Skype fan. We have used "proper VoIP" for a long time, but it works.

But I am also not a fan of spending 90 minutes or so on train and taxi in to London to Millbank studios, being on-air for 4 minutes, and then spending as long getting home. So when Russia Today (RT, Sky channel 512) wanted me on TV and said maybe Skype, I tried it.

It works OK. But it is not that good quality and the sound even broke up.

So I am wondering if I should set up a studio. I have been on RT twice, Sky News several times, BBC a few times, so it may be worth tinkering. I should be able to set up a decent camera and some lights and a decent mic. The idea is that I could provide a web page with streaming live audio/video in HD and use a telephone call in earpiece as talkback.

I wonder if TV studios can handle that - I would think so if they can manage Skype.

I may have to put one of those big "ON-AIR" red lights outside the man-cave though :-)

No idea about anywhere else, but BBC 5 Live use plain vanilla Skype, FaceTime Audio, or the phone. TV tend to use SkypeTx, WMT and LiveU.

SkypeTx differs from the normal app in that it's actually a hardware product (read PC in a custom box) that generates a clean genlockable SDI signal which doesn't rely on screenscraping the desktop through a scan converter.

To be honest, rolling your own solution is unlikely to be popular. Skype is pretty much the lingua franca of public contribution methods for TV.

Skype is usually awful (even audio can be bad) - p2p means you can both have excellent comms but you go via some random PC in who knows where which slugs it down to bad ADSL. Facetime is always better.

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